Hi! This is more of a side project story to help with my writer's block, but I hope you like it nonetheless. Enjoy!
Zane stared at himself in the mirror. It was just... weird. To know that under all of that artificial skin and synthetic eyes and nails and hair, was metal. A blue power source ticking away to fuel his body. To keep fake blood running through his plastic veins. He felt his fingers drag over the light blue veins on his wrist. Or did he? Could he feel? It was just all code and sensors, after all, nothing real like he thought he felt.
He wasn't real. Zane opened up his wrist panel for the third time in five minutes. He had managed to figure out how to activate his internal clock and timer, as well as his scanner. Knowing the time of day down to the millisecond all the time was making the day drag by. He could tell you it had been exactly five hours, thirty-seven minutes, and fifty-six seconds since the team had gotten home from their journey into Birchwood Forest.
A loud knock startled him from his thoughts.
"Zane? You've been in there for hours. Are you sure you're ok?" Jay asked from the other side of the bathroom door. "We're all right here if you need us."
"I'm fine, Jay. Thank you," Zane snapped his panel shut. Not like Jay could see it.
"Are you sure? Being in the bathroom for five hours isn't normal, even for you. What are you even doing in there?"
Zane didn't know what to respond. Anyone else on the team would've most likely made a snarky comeback, but his brain didn't work like that. Coding. Zane corrected himself. Coding, not a brain.
"You not being able to answer that is worrying me. I'm coming in," Jay decided, and Zane didn't have time to protest before he heard a click and the doorknob twisted.
"Hey," Jay greeted softly, shutting the door behind him as he entered. The bathroom certainly wasn't fit for two.
"Hello."
"So, now that I can see your face and you can't lie, how're you doing?" Jay inquired, and Zane, knowing he couldn't "ok" his was out of this, just focused on the floor tiles beneath Jay's feet.
"C'mon, Zane. I know this is life changing and it's only been a few hours, and you must be so overwhelmed, but you can't just hole yourself up in our bathroom and stare at the mirror for the rest of eternity."
Not life. Eternity. Another thing Zane had been thinking about. Jay must've realized he struck a sore subject because Zane found himself being dragged into the hall, Jay babbling something about human contact being good for him, and before he knew it he was in the game room and the rest of the ninja were tackling him into a bear hug, and if he had lungs he would feel like they might burst.
When everything had quieted down and Kai was about to say something, Lloyd burst in.
"Wow, you're a robot? Can you like, shoot lasers and fly with a jetpack in you back, ooh, or can you-" The kid was interrupted by Cole practically hissing at him to get lost and saying something about leave us alone for a bit. Lloyd hastily left, with a metaphorical tail between his legs.
Zane just stared numbly at the spot where Lloyd was. Is that would everybody else would think when they found out? That he was some government-created monster with three different machine guns built into his arms?
"Hey, Frosty, don't worry about Lloyd. I shouldn't have told him," Kai apologized. "It seemed like a good idea at the time."
The four ninja just stood in awkward silence.
Finally, Jay groaned. "I dragged him out of the bathroom for this? I know we're all kind of surprised, and, in Zane's case, pretty shaken, but we've known each other long enough where this shouldn't change anything! We shouldn't be standing here as the poor guy is having an existential crisis in the bathroom!"
"Yeah, sorry Zane. I guess we were all thinking about what happened and not what's happening," Kai's mouth quirked into a small smile.
"That was pretty crappy of us, yeah. Well, we still have a while until Sensei gets back. And Nya should be home in a bit too. Should we just, I don't know, watch a movie or something? We need to just relax right now, honestly," Cole gestured to the TV, and Zane sighed.
"You all go ahead. I'm not really-"
"No." Jay grabbed Zane's wrist as he went to exit, catching him mid-turn. "We're not letting you run off like that. If you're going, we're going with you."
"Yeah. So, if you want to go sit outside in the snow for a few hours and contemplate the meaning of life, we'll try our best to do it too," Cole chuckled, and reached out to pat Zane on the back, but was surprised when the Ice Ninja hugged him tightly instead, which was not a normal Zane thing to do.
The two others joined as well, and they stayed like that for so long even Zane lost track of time.
"There's something kind of important we need to tell you," Kai started. The four ninja plus Nya had gathered in the dining room and sat their mentor down in a chair. Zane was feeling a lot better, and even had figured out that he could, with the right cords, download music and movies onto his hard drive and play them in his vision, which made watching his science fiction a lot easier.
"Is this about Zane being a, what did you call it?" Wu glanced at the Ice Ninja, who smiled softly.
"Nindroid. A combination of the words 'ninja' and 'android'," Zane explained, opening up his wrist panel to further prove his point.
"So, you're a robot?"
"Nindroid, please," Zane nodded.
"This is quite the discovery," Wu nodded, taking a sip of his tea. "How do you feel, Zane?"
"Well, I was quite shocked at first."
"Shocked is an understatement. He locked himself in the bathroom for five hours questioning his existence," Jay shrugged, casting a glance at Zane who cleared his throat in annoyance.
"Anyway, I got better. It's not as hard to deal with now. I wasn't given much time to dwell when I originally found out, as I had to save them all from being smacked around by Treehorns."
This made Jay shut up, and Cole laughed.
"He's still our Zane, no matter what he's made of," The Earth Ninja clapped him on the back.
"Glad to hear," Sensei emptied his cup and set it down. "Is that all?"
"That's it? That's all you have to say?" Nya said skeptically, raising an eyebrow at her Sensei's attitude.
"It doesn't change anything, does it? Zane will still train, he is still the Master of Ice, and he is still a ninja. The only one who can decide if things change is Zane, and it doesn't appear like anything is different."
"Well, when you put it like that..." Nya shrugged, and glanced at Zane, who was smiling sheepishly at the ground.
Zane remained when everyone else cleared our, choosing instead to stay and talk with Sensei.
"Now that the others aren't here putting pressure on you, are you alright?" Wu knew Zane had a tendency to internalize, a trait that didn't help on a team of extroverts.
"I'm doing fine, thank you. It has taken some adjusting, but I'm glad to have such understanding teammates," Zane nodded. The conversation continued, and soon enough, Zane began to feel more and more comfortable in his own artificial skin.